


she likes killing you after you're dead

by littledust



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: F/F
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2007-06-04
Updated: 2007-06-04
Packaged: 2017-10-17 21:50:22
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,280
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/181522
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/littledust/pseuds/littledust
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"That's how the roses grow, with the wicked old witch and the power of the moon."</p>
            </blockquote>





	she likes killing you after you're dead

**Author's Note:**

> Written for [](http://kethlenda.livejournal.com/profile)[**kethlenda**](http://kethlenda.livejournal.com/) in the [](http://community.livejournal.com/hpde_smutathon/profile)[**hpde_smutathon**](http://community.livejournal.com/hpde_smutathon/). Twisting fairytales into the horror genre will never stop being fun.

The rain had stopped by the time Ginny reached the village, but the ground had not dried and mud squelched around her feet, chilling them despite her boots. The looks she got were chilly as well; the red Weasley hair stood out amidst all the gray, she supposed, and witches of her ilk were still not welcome in the few secret spaces left in England. They hated the new scientific magic, hated everything to do with it, even if it kept things from going mad after Voldemort fell. But they had been quelled by the end of the war, and would not soon make trouble again. The villagers only shot her sour looks and dared not speak, not even to each other.

High childish voices broke the silence as she walked on, and Ginny let out a breath she hadn't realized she had been holding. Three little girls stood at the edge of the village, two turning the rope and one jumping. _Slap_ went the rope and _squish_ went the jumping one's shoes. All three sang a song:

 _Lizzie Borden took an axe  
And gave her mother forty whacks,  
When she saw what she had done,  
She gave her father forty-one!_

They stopped as soon as they saw her approach.

"You've come to see the wicked old witch," the jumper announced, with a shake of her long dark braids. "But she's dead and doesn't want to see anyone anymore."

"It's dangerous," one of the turners said, and her hair was hidden under an enormous rain hat. Her eyes were so blue and wide with sincerity that Ginny smiled.

"I'm sure I'll be all right. Do you know where her house is?"

"We're right by the gate," the jumper continued, as if there had been no interruption, "but you can't see it because of the fog. There's always fog round the house unless it's nighttime. That's how the roses grow, with the wicked old witch and the power of the moon."

"You don't know that," said the other rope turner. "We don't know anything, so we should all just stay out."

Ginny slipped her wand out from beneath her cloak, tapped it against her palm, and tried to look as reassuring as possible. The little girls did not seem at all surprised, but then perhaps they were too young to remember a time when any witch or wizard could carry a wand. The war had changed that, too. "I have my own kind of magic. It protects me."

"The wicked old witch can get anyone."

"She stays in there and waits."

"She'll get you."

Ginny was not overly fond of children, a consequence of being the youngest in a family of seven, and the constant warnings were beginning to wear her patience thin. Without responding, she strode forward, flicking her wand and muttering a spell. Latin was the language of science and magic, further evidence for this new blending of lore, so repeating charms always pleased her. The fog parted and there was a wrought-iron gate, spiky and black, all in proper witch tradition. Bellatrix Lestrange's own retreat, the place where she once perfected her experiments, once trained Death Eaters. Years of research had yielded both the location and the keys to unlocking all the enchantments guarding the research and papers. Ginny's heart fluttered in anticipation. The spell had not cleared the fog enough for her to make out more than a dim black outline of a house, a house on a hill.

She turned to say goodbye to the little girls, but they were gone.

*

The house, despite all its protective charms, had been falling to ruins, presumably since Bellatrix met her death at the hands of Harry Potter. _(And the blood was not as red as she expected, rather a deep dark shade that splashed onto his skin and made it white, snow white.)_ Yet its holes and cave-ins did not seem gouged; perhaps it was the softening effect of the multitudes of roses. They curled over everything, pink and red and white and yellow, their perfume lacing the air, covering whatever lay beneath. Strange that they could grow in all that fog, but then, the garden received an unusual amount of sunshine. The fog down the hill was probably the result of fading enchantments.

Ginny took notes of all these suppositions in a little notebook. She found nowadays it helped her to transcribe everything in scientific terms, all extrapolation and inferences and hypotheses. Hermione had explained to her after the war about the little adjustments and changes the wizarding world needed to make. Ginny came to share the opinion. The world was so much more orderly now.

Three days she spent collecting data, each night Apparating back to her flat in London to work on more formal reports and catch up on a bit of sleep. It wouldn't do to spend the night in a strange place. _(Just as it wouldn't do to open a strange book and follow the poisoned penned words upon the pages.)_ But she did not find anything interesting by day, only beautiful flowers and incomplete scraps of spells, so hasty and sketched that likely they had been abandoned before achieving any sort of fruition. There were no clues to Bellatrix's twisted psyche, nothing that might be of any help to them now. Ginny still wasn't quite sure what the Ministry wanted with all this information, but Hermione seemed very earnest about things like prevention and enforced rehabilitation, so that was all right.

"It might be a good idea to stay just for one night," she mused to herself, for there was no one else to muse to. "The reports of the witch growing roses by moonlight are hardly substantiated by factual evidence available in regards to the amount of magic remaining..." She trailed off, uncertain.

What?

Occasionally she remembered that all her new vocabulary was borrowed, some of it invented. It fell then like ashes from her tongue _(ashes ashes we all fall down)_ , flakes of Hermione's odd Muggle concepts and really, wasn't it she who ran the government, and not... whoever the latest Prime Minister was? Ginny felt disturbed and focused instead on a red, red rose.

"Stop and smell the roses." Another idiom, but safer, familiar.

The sunset made the white roses yellow and the yellow roses deep gold and the pink roses crimson and the red, red roses such red, red roses that it was like drowning. Ginny inhaled and exhaled and reached out to stroke the petals of a particularly lovely one, catching her finger on a thorn as she did so.

Her eyelids drooped shut, and Ginny fell asleep.

*

 _(She awoke to an impossibly full moon, pouring pouring pouring light, milk over roses. Ginny saw her hands glow white before her but not like a ghost's, wondered without realizing it where her clothes had gone. One does not question the logic of dreams, only the logic of reality. She turned to look for the witch but all she saw was beauty everywhere around her. Ginny walked naked through the garden and was not ashamed._

 _But there_ was _a ghost, she saw, a shining, shimmering thing, too transparent for features. It drifted to and fro, never far from the garden's single apple tree. Tears came to Ginny's eyes, tears of awe, tears of joy. Somehow it made the garden complete. There was the moon and there were the shadows and there was the ghost, some strange offspring of both, twisted and mingling._

 _"You're giving off light," she called to the ghost. "For the roses?"_

 _She reached out a hand--)_

*

Ginny woke with a shovel in her hands and did not question its origin.

Went to the apple tree.

Digging, digging, digging up bones. Her head hurt in the glare of the sun, the sun that pierced through fog and clouds and did not nourish the soil at all. It was a dead garden, a garden of death, that was at the root of it, the root of the matter and the heart of the situation, the heart no longer part of the circulatory system, removed and eaten by a wicked wicked witch. There was no heart beating against the bleached white ribs in the crumbling black soil.

"A very unscientific form of magic," Ginny murmured, and went to sleep again.

*

 _(It was only noon and the moon was out, but the night was welcoming and she slipped into it as she would a bathrobe, or an old rotting house on an old rotting hill for an old rotting system, all these rotting things in the guise of something alive and new. She crawled out of the earth and into a clump of roses that would be a rosebed were it plotted by human hands. Inhuman hands created for her a bed of thorns and petals, and Ginny laughed aloud when vines curled about her wrists and ankles._

 _"There is a word called photosynthesis. I don't remember what it means and I don't understand it, but it's what makes plants grow," she whispered._

 _"What a very Muggle thing to say."_

 _The ghost, the wicked witch, Bellatrix Lestrange. The dead woman. She looked like a portrait Ginny had seen once at Grimmauld Place, not like a corpse or even a woman aged by years in Azkaban. Her hair was ebony and curled at the ends. She had a mouth like a red, red rose. The roses seemed important somehow. Probably because she could feel them rustling beneath her._

 _Bellatrix sat beside her and stroked her hair. "My, what red hair you have." Her laugh was rich, her fingers soft. "You and your family always did. You_ are _a nosy little one, aren't you? Poking around, trying to dig up my secrets." She leaned forward, breath ice cold against Ginny's ear. "I am the house, little traitor. I am the garden, I am the hill, I am the moon. Three Black sisters, three witches, magic older than you could ever dream. It cannot be understood through_ study _. It cannot be understood, only learned, only bled out of the earth." Then she snapped off a rose, and Ginny did not blink when the broken stem began to leak black blood--black blood, blue blood, red blood--she laughed again, hysterical._

 _"You're a little mad, aren't you?" Bellatrix asked, and her lips curved into something more vampiric than smile._

 _Ginny replied, "Insanity is only a diagnosis." Stumbling a little over the last word, the metal flavor, the precision of steel._

 _The rose tickled the undersides of her forearms. Was too cold against the bare skin of her breasts. She shifted, uncomfortable, when Bellatrix moved the rose to the insides of her thighs, pressing soft petals there, still the red, red smile, the hunger with teeth. The vines creaked but held her fast, thorns against her skin, blood on white and black. In the garden stalked the spectre of a monochrome macabre fairytale. Bellatrix was saying something again._

 _"It is not degrading for me to touch you, but rather honoring you with my touch. You are the sacrifice, the little death for the renewal of life." She sounded like a girl dreaming of love under the moon, not a mad witch clinging to a dead kind of immortality. The inexplicability of it all tumbled over and over into Ginny, the sweet drag of time and torture. She did not close her eyes when Bellatrix used a thorn to open a gash on her thigh, only stared up and up at the leaves of the apple tree dark and light with the moon. Old magic, the new authority of the rediscovered ancient. She could lose herself in it and never, never doubt the world order again. The rose was pressed against her labia now, now circling round her clitoris, and the world--the world--the world smelled of earth._

 _"Good girl," Bellatrix crooned. Laid the rose to rest between Ginny's breasts. Beads of blood fell from thorns to skin, drip drip drip._

 _Then Bellatrix opened her red, red mouth and crouched to devour her whole. Ginny gasped in tiny final breaths, marking her time in the air, in the oxygen Hermione once tried to define for her--in one of the elements, one that didn't belong to her, its masculinity transcendent--oh, oh, there was something to be said for consumption, the lascivious flick of tongue up and down and up again, the tug tug tug against her bindings, the blood running down her wrists and legs--the wicked witch's long, long dark hair and her greed and her audible tangible contentment while feasting--oh, oh, and her last breath was a wordless cry, animal shout of pleasure, euphoria in returning to dust._

 _She was falling, falling, riding the waves down and down into the hole she dug, and then the earth spilling over and over and over--)_

*

Skip, hop, jump. Turning, turning rope. Stop.

One of the little girls took off her rain hat, shaking her head so the blonde curls shone even under gray skies. "I want the next one. It isn't _fair_ ," she sulked.

The dark-haired girl rolled her eyes. "Very well, if you must." She motioned impatiently for the rope to start turning again.

But the last one would not. "Maybe we ought to just sleep."

"Maybe you ought to, but I'm not," declared the one with black braids.

"You know we're meant to play forever."

This seemed to quell the dissenter, and up started the rhyme once more.

 _Lizzie Borden took an axe  
And gave her mother forty whacks,  
When she saw what she had done,  
She gave her father forty-one..._


End file.
